Even those who can afford real warbirds don’t fly them much. The Bear 360 addresses that in an affordable package that any Walter Mitty can actually handle.

By Paul Bertorelli

If money were no object and you could afford a hangar full of airplanes, would one of them be a warbird, say a P-51 or an F4U Corsair? Probably. Just as likely, the airplane would sit in the hangar, kept airworthy by an expert mechanic, but rarely exercised. Why is that? It’s one of the natural laws of vintage aircraft ownership and also one of the reasons the airplane pictured above—the Bear 360—was designed and built.

The Bear is, as far as we’re able to determine, a unique animal indeed: a newly manufactured military-feel aircraft built by a foreign industrial power, formerly a Cold War enemy. Eastern bloc imports like the…